I thought I”d do a post on the story of Float, which actually goes back about 10 years now.
After university I was in the process of setting up a web design business. My income was next to nothing and my overdraft was growing steadily!
One evening I decided that if I was going to manage running a business, I seriously needed to get a grip of my personal finances. I realised I needed to figure out where I was overspending without constantly getting a nasty shock when visiting the ATM at the end of each month.
Seeing the Light
I tried keeping a note book of my spending each month. This wasn’t easy, there was a lot of repetition and I quickly realised that a spreadsheet would be a much much better way to do things. And after running the spreadsheet for a few months I realised I could now see the impact of spending patterns and project this into the future.
Now if I was consistently spending £100 more than I brought in each month I could see my bank balance in 12 months time being £1200 more overdrawn than where I started out. It helped me the realise how important it was to draw a consistent salary from the business, and it proved to be a good discipline for the business too.
Next Steps
After a while of running this spreadsheet, I realised that I could probably use the spreadsheet with a few adaptations for our business – so after a few hours knee deep in Excel, soon we were using it for our tax and Vat returns too.
This system carried on for a few years and the spreadsheet for business grew in complexity. It began to be quite a task that needed completed each month, and there were often many mistakes in data entry that took an infuriating amount of time to find and fix. The problem was now, that this was very much “my” spreadsheet. Although I tried to explain it or delegate it to others, it had it’s quirks just like any piece of code that has expanded over time.
Building something people want
In 2009 I had the privilege of going to Y-combinators startup school in Berkley, CA. The motto there was “build something people want” and Paul Graham gave a fantastic lecture on advice from startup founders. http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html I felt like if we could solve the same problem my spreadsheet was solving for other businesses that there would be something valuable in that – and so the vision for Float was born.
For some reason we applied and got accepted for mini Seedcamp in London in the summer of 2010 which was another great experience and pretty much provided the validation we needed to start taking it seriously.
We incorporated the Float Yard in October 2010 and got our first Founder member the first day we started accepting payments in July this year. That was a happy moment!
The journey continues…